zushi's place

One thing I've been thinking on and off for the past few days is what really triggers how much I enjoy a piece of media. The answer that I consistently come back to seems to be a sense of aesthetics – the sense that everything in some sort of fictional world feels “just right”.

This type of “completeness” feels really difficult to find in media, and contributes a lot to my peculiar tastes. For example, I wouldn't consider Star Wars to have a good aesthetic, neither does a decent amount of Disney films. Magic the Gathering doesn't really get it right, and Pokemon doesn't either. But Serial Experiments Lain, NGE, and Revolutionary Girl Utena seem to hit it on the spot. And so does Eccentric Family, and that there are four out of five of my favorite TV animations.

JoJo seems to have it, though it's not something I could easily tap into. On the other hand, the Personal series seems to be very aware of it.

Touhou is one of the interesting examples of this. Almost every other Touhou game presents a self-contained, complete aesthetics. This sort of frequency feels unheard of among creators, and it feels like Touhou is in the business of aesthetics much more so than games, art, pretty patterns, or music.

I was thinking a lot about how to concisely convey the feeling of “having a complete aesthetic”, but it feels almost impossible to convey through words. At least currently, I feel like as soon as I define some kind of ruleset, I will find exceptions that slip under the radar.

Of course, the definition could end up being “just stuff that I really like”. But I don't really feel like that is the case. For example, Made in Abyss and Hotline Miami are example of artworks that have a ton of things I don't like, but still manages to fascinate me with its strong aesthetics. On the other hand, My High School Romance is a show that I really like, but doesn't really have aesthetics as it's strong suit (though it does have some of that).

I did eventually stumble upon something that makes the job of articulating what a “complete aesthetic” is to me easier. In China there's an artist named Rei who did a series of pieces for two collaborative music albums themed around mythologies from around the world. The English name of the project is Dream Catchers from Around the World, and almost every image has what feels like a “complete aesthetic”. The pieces probably required a prestigious amount of research, and as a result the pieces feel like they come alive.

This discovery of so many of what feels like “complete aesthetics” is astounding to me equal to Touhou's productivity around aesthetics, and I'm really surprised that I haven't seen the artist referenced at all in the West.

Here's an example of the said images, centered around the idea of the Adam & Eve creation myth:

And here are all the said images:

https://www.pcstore.com.tw/g77shop/M39209915.htm

Though I can't still quite articulate what makes an aesthetic feel “complete” to me, looking at these pieces, I feel like I'm starting to put together some initial ideas. Hopefully one day I can articulate it fully or even better, set out to create a bunch compelling ones of my own.

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Categorized under: #art, #aesthetics